WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Web-based games

for

From: Nolan Darilek
Date: Aug 26, 2020 1:12PM

I can speak a bit to this. I'm about to launch an audio game on a
variety of platforms. I do support the web, though I likely won't for
this title since my approach has some rough edges.


Broadly speaking, you have a couple approaches. First is to stick close
to HTML elements, using regular web accessibility practices to iron out
the rough edges. This can work for more UI-focused games, or for games
where performance and graphics needs aren't too heavy. You're also
pretty much tied to the web, which may or may not be a good thing for
your use case.


The second approach is rendering to a canvas. At this point you've
abandoned web accessibility, and are thoroughly in roll-your-own
territory. This isn't necessarily the bad thing it may sound like. What
do WCAG and the ARIA authoring guidelines recommend to, say, make
Asteroids or Pong accessible? :) Rolling your own lets you use the same
code on multiple platforms and, say, port an SDL game to WebAssembly.
You can often call out to JavaScript to, say, use the speechSynthesis
API. You can also use more traditional game engines like Unity, then
compile to a web target. You have lots of power, but also lots of
responsibility if you want accessibility.


Hybrid approaches are also possible, though I haven't delved as much
into these. You could use HTML for your UI, then unhide a canvas and
start a game loop when a Play link/button is clicked. This could also
work with wasm as well--make your game's `main()` function immediately
launch the game, and have your Play button call that.


For my part, I've written a cross-platform screen reader that runs in
the open source Godot engine. Currently supported platforms are Linux,
Windows (desktop and universal, possibly the Xbox), Android, MacOS, and
the web. iOS should be coming soon once I've figured out how to
successfully dance with Apple. This approach does put you pretty
squarely outside of web accessibility land, but I don't know if web
accessibility techniques are up to, say, conveying a world like The Last
of Us 2 as a game engine can be made to (but I'd certainly welcome being
wrong on that. :) I don't necessarily recommend my approach as
one-size-fits all, but I hope my ramblings help to put some perspective
on the landscape of accessible web games. I don't plan on releasing
future titles to the web right now, but they'd make great concept demos
for quickly trying out game mechanics without me having to build them
for each platform I support, and end users having to download and
install them.

On 8/26/20 1:45 PM, <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:
> The latest Syntax podcast includes a discussion of creating a minesweeper-style Web game with the React framework. The hosts suggested using React's pointer events. That made me cringe. I know little about React or its pointer events, but I assume that using them excludes keyboard users. Perhaps they will work on touch screens?
> today I did some searching and found skimpy resources for a developer wanting to create an accessible Web game. Does anyone have suggestions for reading materials on this topic.
> Jeff Gutsell
>
>
> > > >